


More

by amanda_jolene



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Gen, Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 20:09:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1996179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amanda_jolene/pseuds/amanda_jolene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another post break up story (season 2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	More

She shows up at his doorstep unexpectedly one night.

They’ve been avoiding each other for weeks, taking turns with their mutual friends and occupying opposite sides of the bar. She didn’t want a relationship and he didn’t want to be friends so they passed each other as strangers who knew too much, hearts ripped and trampled but neither of them budging (pride runs strong in teenage hearts). 

Rae knows he’s home, sees him in the window of his bedroom but he’s not answering the door. That little voice in the back her mind (the one she’s gotten good at tamping down) starts whispering that Finn probably saw her and he’s not going to answer the door because there’s no hope for them- friendship or otherwise. Her stomach hurts when she turns to leave and her foot hits the first step when she hears the doors open and his voice is soft and confused. “Rae?” 

There’s a moment where she just wants to keep walking but her heart tells her to woman up because this is important. Even if nothing changes, she needs to say this and he needs to hear it because she never wants Finn Nelson to doubt for even a moment that he’s anything less than pure perfection. 

She’s seen him in passing but standing in front of him like this, with no friends to buffer the space and no music playing to take up for lost words, she shifts awkwardly. “Hey.” 

“What are you doing here?” 

The space between them feel insurmountable and neither can remember how it felt to be close enough to read the emotion in each other’s breath and Rae can feel the tiny fissures of her heart pop again. 

“I just wanted to say that… I’m sorry. For what I did and how I did it. I never meant to hurt you, Finn.” 

He wants to say you didn’t hurt me but he’s the honest sort and he’s tired of hurting. “Well, you did.”

“I just… I want you to know that it wasn’t you. You didn’t do anything wrong… you’ve always been perfect to me. I didn’t like myself much at the time and I couldn’t understand how you could like me if I couldn’t.” 

He’s known this for a while. It was one of those revelations that hit him when he was up too late with too much drink in his system and it had knocked the breath out of him because he wasn’t sure how he had missed it before. He had thought about calling her but he realized he couldn’t make her love herself. This was something she had to do alone. “Do you like yourself now?”

“I do,” she nods. “I’m not so bad.” The joke falls flat on her lips and she clamps down on the inside of her cheek to keep from crying. “I miss you, Finn.” 

It’s his turn to shift uncomfortably. He had just gotten back on a regular sleep pattern and his heart didn’t ache quite so fiercely. But more than that, he was returning to himself- collected, moody, popular Finn, the boy whose heart bowed to no woman. “I can’t do this, Rae.” 

(When he shuts the door, she’ll walk home and he’ll head upstairs and both will wonder how many times a heart can break before the damage is permanent.)

He calls her two night later and there’s silence after the initial hello and sorry to call so late.

“You there?” She questions softly. 

“Can we be friends?”

The word feels empty and hollow his tongue, a placebo for what they once had but his heart is crack open again and after another night of not sleeping, he figures something has to be better than nothing. 

“If that’s what you want.”

It’s not but it will do. 

They start all over but it’s different now. Neither understand how the experience of tearing each other to shreds has made them closer but they’ve suddenly become best mates. They talk in between classes and share beers at the pub and become a unit none of their friends can explain (but they skirt around them like they’re a time bomb). They move around each other perfectly and ignore the sensation of longing in the pit of their stomachs because their relationship had ended while their friendship had endured so they settled.

It comes to a screeching halt one night during a game of Spin the Bottle when Finn ends up kissing a girl a second too long. It’s a paltry kiss and it makes his head hurt because he knows Rae has ruined him for life and he’s suddenly mad at her. He sits down next to her again and turns to glare only to find that she’s mad at him, too (she leaves the party and he stays rooted because he’s so tired of chasing her). 

He sees her at the pub a few days later and she peels the label off her beer and refuses to meet his eye when she says, “I don’t think we can be friends, Finn. It hurts too much.” Her breath comes out as a shudder and he puts his hands in his lap to hide their shake. “I want more or… I don’t want anything.” 

“We didn’t do well with more.” He reminds her gently but he’s thinking if she hadn’t destroyed him the first time, they’d have been together 3 months already and he wouldn’t have had to kiss Julia at the party and none of this would be happening. 

“We could try again?” 

He closes his eyes at the ache in her voice and in his chest. “No. I don’t want that.”   
When he opens his eyes, she’s gone and he’s not sure what he’s doing, but he picks up the discarded beer label and pockets it. 

He looks at that label much later. It’s crinkled and torn from his pocket and jagged and frayed from where she had picked at it but he couldn’t tell which of them inflicted the most damage. “We did this together,” he says out loud and the words crash back into his ears so loudly that he finds himself hunched over his desk with tape in his hand. It only take a little smoothing out and some gentle coaxing before it’s presentable again and he fingers it for a moment, head and heart working out the connection, before slipping on his shoes. 

It’s too late to knock on the front door so he climbs up the garage and knocks on her window. She looks at him for a long minute and his heart tugs uncomfortably because she’s been crying and he’s a jerk and he can never talk about her being dishonest with him because he’s just as bad.   
“What are you doing?” She whispers when she opens the window. “Finn, I told you-“ 

He hands her the beer label. “We both messed it up but it was fixable.” He watches her fingertips smooth over the tape, her bottom lip quivering and he’s so ready for both of them to stop crying. “I want more, too, Rae. I need more.” 

Maybe they should take it slow or maybe they’ve taken it too slow, he can’t decide. But he slips quietly through her window and then breathlessly into her and he comes undone at the sound of his own name mouthed against his neck. 

He knows he should head home but he’s still stroking her hair when her alarm goes off the next morning and for once, he’s glad he couldn’t sleep.


End file.
